​Suddenly, a few weeks ago, I felt some pain on the front and back of my right ribs. At first it was mild, so I did some stretches on the bed (I sat with my but on the bed, bent my back from the waist down, and then got up very slowly, always with Eric’s help) and put a hot pack on my chest. But the pain got worse and worse. I realized what was happening when I was doing my arm exercises: I was compensating with my right rib muscles the movements I was doing with my left arm. All the progress I was sure I was gaining was, in fact, the product of my right muscles’ work! And when I walked, I noticed that instead of grabbing the crutch, I was gripping it and tightening my muscles as I gripped.
I stopped doing some of my arm exercises, but then the pain got worse, to the point that it hurt when I was coughing or spitting. No matter how many methods I tried, how many exercises I stopped, the pain increased and expanded to my armpit. It was so excruciating, that I could barely stretch my arm to grab things. The pain kept growing, so much so, that I started waking up in the middle of the night. Neither heat nor stretching on the bed could bring release. And the worse thing of all was that I couldn’t locate the source, and therefore couldn’t know what to refrain from doing or what to do to stop it. We couldn’t think of consulting a professional during the pandemic without my having been vaccinated. Fortunately, Eric was an athlete during a good part of his life and is able to learn from experience. So, he could advice stretches that would reduce the pain, and I added heat on my back ribs. Then, my nurse aid suggested some extra stretches and how to eliminate and modify the previous ones.
Step by step, repeated stretches and heat, and ceasing to make any movement that would increase it (such as writing on bed, which I was doing unawares), have reduced the pain considerably. I no longer feel it when coughing, spitting, and breathing deeply, but it always threatens with coming back; it hasn’t left my front right ribs, although it’s much more bearable. To keep it at bay, I need to do my stretches religiously, be cautious when I’m writing and exercising, and wear an ice pack on my back after working out and a hot pack when going to sleep. The sole idea of suffering excruciating pain fills me with irrational fear. So, I’m taking all possible precautions. In any case, I may be suffering unbearable pain, but as Eric told me, nothing compares with the effects of brain injury.

​I’ve already talked about my brain hemorrhages. I was in a coma for quite long until the neurosurgeon and his team could identify the origin and be able to attend to it. I was on a ventilator and a feeding tube for a while. As they have told me, the long wait and their inability to predict if I would live or die made my family and friends think of my potential loss and increased their concern for me. And when my friends who weren’t that close and synagogue members found out, the severity of my illness and its effects made them feel the need to support Eric and me.
All of these things brought about quality changes in my relationships, from the closest to the most distant. Acquaintances behaved as I would have expected from intimate friends. Neighborliness turned into warm relationship. And as others changed, I, too, changed – their different behavior stirred new feelings in me: I experienced what being cared for meant; people were there for Eric and me.
There’s something else that has changed in me, and that’s my attitude regarding other people’s past or present conduct toward me – my views have experienced a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.  I look at my feelings years ago, and they seem petty and self-centered, and I react in a completely different way. Because of this turn, I think of my injury as a watershed; I jokingly refer to my life history as “before March 23rd, 2018” and “after March 23rd, 2018.” I start reacting as my old self used to react, but I immediately tap myself on the shoulder.
I had distanced myself from an old, close friend because I’d decided, somewhat pettily, that she was behaving unfairly toward me. But since I’d inadvertently kept her as my WhatsApp contact, I sent her a happy birthday voice message. I got a very warm reply right away. In it, she expressed her affection and care for me. This reconnection brought the past back. I recalled my anger, but I also recalled the good times we’d had and our fondness for each other. And I wondered why I’d gotten mad and had decided to stop being in touch. I told myself that no matter my ambivalence toward her, I had no reason for keeping my distance.
There are many examples like this: many friends I illogically criticized, and many I lost solely because I (unreasonably) made the decision to part from them. My injury has caused a lot of damage, but it has also given me a lot of things, among them, a different perspective from where to look at things, a different perspective from where to look at myself. So, while I have reasons to be upset about it, I also have reasons to be grateful (although sometimes I have to remind myself of these).

​When COVID spread like fire in New York City, causing a lot of deaths, and the amount of new cases rose in New Rochelle, Cuomo imposed quarantine rules around the state. Additionally, despite its advantages – wide spaces, low-density buildings, and few commuters to the city – Beacon had enough cases to require strict rules. And people were scared! To people’s compliance with new rules, you have to add Eric’s and my fear of my catching the virus, as I tell in another chapter. The result was visits on the deck, keeping the right distance, and wearing masks. But then winter came. That did away with visits on the deck; the sun and the warmth vanished. Luckily, with the enforcement of the lockdown in most cities around the world, human ingenuity was spurred: new online platforms were developed, and all phone apps started to be used.
So, since our home became empty of visitors, I’ve started using my phone and computer much more often: every week, I have a video-call with my friend Ellen to chat and sing, and sometimes another friend from the synagogue joins us; on Saturday evenings, some of us get together on Zoom to sing Havdalah (and take the opportunity to catch up); on Tuesdays at 1:30 I have a weekly video-call with my cousin who lives in Britain (with whom I used to play when I was a child), and at 3:30, with a synagogue friend (she’s an example of the synagogue members who became friends about whom I write in another chapter); and every few months I talk on the phone with grad school friends who live too far away to visit (the epidemic has made it impossible to spend the night).
The last ones are “phone visits,” as my grandmother used to call her long phone conversations with her friends. Besides these, I talk every day through WhatsApp with my mother in Argentina, and almost every day with my brothers and sisters-in-law; I talk once a week with other close friends (an example of new friendships that deepened, which I mention in another chapter); we have a meeting with my brothers and their families and my mother on Zoom on someone’s birthday or to celebrate a holiday, be it Jewish or conventional; and we have an extended family meeting on Zoom (all of the cousins, their spouses,  and our parents) to celebrate holidays or just to meet and chat.
I have plenty of ways to share my life with friends and family: exchanging news, venting, singing, practicing Hebrew, seeing familiar faces, communicating often with friends I haven’t seen in a long time. I am closer to beloved people who can’t visit for various reasons, COVID and the quarantine among them. I have plenty of ways to keep friendships alive. So, although the house and deck are empty, I feel they’re always full.

​Some time ago, I started having a sharp pain on my knee. I asked Eric, and he said it was a twinge. Eric is my to-go-to in all matters concerning physical therapy because of his long experience as an athlete. I always rely on his judgment. He recommended heat when at rest and an ace bandage when exercising it. When my nurse aid found out, she said to refrain from walking with the crutch and switching to the bar instead. And I stopped going to the bathroom to reduce the demand on my right leg. After a while of taking care of it, my knee ceased to hurt. But then my ankle started feeling sore.
This time, Eric couldn’t identify the cause, so he couldn’t come up with a treatment. And yet, even if the pain felt like a dull ache, when the time came to walking in the dining room with the crutch, I had to stop after a short while and switch to arm exercises. Eric agreed to my suggestion of heat and cold, adding to it the use of an ice pack after exercise. He didn’t think much about my idea of putting an insole in my shoes, but went and bought two. And when he was going to put them in, he discovered that the shoes already had one! So now I had four remedies for my ankle: heat before exercising, cold afterward, giving my ankle a break, and insoles in my shoes. So far, it doesn’t really look like they’ve taken effect – the pain comes and goes. But I’m somewhat optimistic; I’m hoping it will subside, and I’ll be able to go back to walking.
This shifting pain is a new problem for me. I’d been walking for more than a year without any kind of issue in my feet or legs, and I was feeling lucky because no pain had appeared to thwart my practicing. And here I was, unable to walk regularly right in the middle of my exercises. Eric dismissed my ankle pain saying that he couldn’t find a cause for it and it wasn’t sharp. Then, he gave his own nerve pain as an example: I should tough it out until it subsided. His response made me really mad. How could he compare my pain with his? How could he compare me, a brain injury survivor who couldn’t even walk, with him, a “normal” person? The gall!
Yet I should pay more attention to what Eric says. Actually, I should pay more attention to what others, the “normal” people, have to say. “Normal” people have a lot of experiences to share with me from which I can learn. No past experience, as rough as it was and as many disabilities as it caused, enables me to teach others, the “normal” people. No experience puts me in a position of exceptionality. As my nurse aid said when I asked her what I should do, if I should stop or continue walking, “babying” the foot because it was sore (in my case, because I’m scared of the foot’s getting worse and preventing me from walking, which would stop me from practicing) is the worse way of protecting it. It’s better to walk, even if I’m in pain (or, in Eric’ words, to “tough it out”), because that way, my ankle will heal.
Since I had the injury I’m scared of everything, and among these things, I’m scared of my pain’s getting worse and my being unable to walk, trapped in my bed. True. But I have to stop “babying” myself. And I have to stop finding reasons – which are actually excuses – to keep doing it. I have to step out of the position where my experience has put me, and thus giving up the advantage it gives me – the comfort it implies. I have to walk, no matter how, in order to be free as fast as possible.

​I’m lying in bed, tired after a long, wearying day of monotonous exercises and of researching, writing, and translating (although these last ones are my most joyful activities). Amid drifting thoughts, I suddenly feel I’m suspended in the air. It’s the same feeling I used to have when I on a plane – as if the plane were still in mid-air, when it was actually flying at high speed. And this feeling is part of a seamless weave of memories that transports me into a past that when I didn’t have a crutch: when I could walk fast without hesitation; when I could speak and type fast without hesitation; and when I could fly to Argentina, where my home, family, and old friends live.
After I met Eric and all the time we were together, he and I would fly to Argentina every year, and I would show him my favorite spots in Buenos Aires, the city where I was born and raised. And after Nathan grew up, the three of us would travel around and visit stunning places– or revisit some, in my case. There, we had the chance of walking around and enjoy the views they could offer. We went to Peninsula Valdés, a gorgeous place south of Buenos Aires, where the water is blue and clear; piles of fossils form rocky elevations; and sea lions, elephant seals, whales, and penguins come to breed. We went to the northwest, where there’s a desert with deep ravines surrounded by breathtaking rock mountains that rise up into cloudless skies.
And the sense of flying also brings along a pervading fear that comes to me from the future – I experience the anticipated feeling that will accompany me on the ride to the airport; will sit beside me, in front of me, and behind me in the lounge; and will follow me on the way to the plane that will fly to Argentina, where my home is; where my family and old friends live; and where my mother, who is very old and in need of company, lives.
Fear will sit beside me, in front of me, and behind me in the plane as I have the familiar sense of being suspended in the air. If I overcome my inability to walk without a cane and am vaccinated (which will make me immune to the omnipresent virus), maybe I won’t be able to go home anyway because I won’t overcome this all-pervasive fear that has stubbornly decided to remain with me forever.

​I was talking about Kahlo with a friend who is an artist and art critic. We discussed Kahlo’s accident and the way it had influenced her art. My friend mentioned details about the artist’s life that were unknown to me. I found out that Kahlo had had her accident when she was in her teens, and that because of her accident, she’d been forced to spend a large part of her life in bed and undergo plenty of operations. So, her accident and its aftermath had left an indelible mark in her art that can be seen in most of her work. My friend spoke about her visit to the Kahlo museum in Mexico and the impression it had made on her; Kahlo’s death and her body were constantly present in her artworks, so much so, that seeing it had completely changed my friend’s view of the world. After our conversation, I started googling the artist and her paintings, and was struck by her work. I was familiar with it because of youth memories, but reading about her was getting to know her again.
During our conversation, my friend and I discussed Kahlo’s appearance in her own paintings. When I said that when I saw them in my youth I’d been (negatively) impressed by their self-centeredness, my friend argued that the impact of Kahlo’s works transcended her presence in them. Seeing her paintings again today, when my memory of them was already vague, made me rethink their content and effect on viewers. Because of my feeling an identification with her – to a certain extent – I started to reexamine the influence of my injury and convalescence on the content of my poems.  
A fresh view of Kahlo’s paintings made me reflect on my injury and its impact on my work. The first poetry book I wrote, Lagos [Lakes], was based on my waking up from my coma and the feelings my injury had caused in me – confusion, memory loss, and disability had generated anger (because of my inability to move and my constant dependence on the aid of others) and a sense of helplessness. I wanted to translate my emotions into words, but I chose to erase the I from my poems and replace it with infinitives; I (mistakenly) disliked women poets’ constant resort to personal feelings and (male) critics’ pointing at intimacy as a major feature of “feminine” poetry. Yet, after reading about Frida Kahlo and looking at her work, a lot of new questions appeared in my mind; I’m having to reevaluate the relationship between traumatic experiences and physical pain, and the word or stroke, and the transcendence of self-presence.

​A few days ago, I called my cousin to say good-bye to her before she left for the US. My cousin’s daughter and son-in-law have been living in California since before they had a baby, Carmen, and Carmen is now six years old. My cousin loves her granddaughter and misses her awfully. Argentina authorized trips abroad, and California is taking careful steps to avoid contagion. So, with preventive measures in place, my cousin decided to travel to the US to visit with Carmen.
We had a long talk about our lives, our family, political issues, and the two things that are always in everybody’s mind around the world: the COVID pandemic, and the quarantine measures taken by each country. When we were about to hang up, my cousin said she wanted to congratulate me on the progress I’d made on my walking; she’d seen the latest video of me Eric had sent, which my mom had forwarded her. My cousin was very impressed about the product of my efforts.
            I told her there was no need to congratulate me; it wasn’t my perseverance and effort that had caused it but self-imposed high standards. My cousin, who’s a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, said that there was another possibility besides self-imposed high standards (which, in my case, are usually accompanied by self-criticism): my wish to live. It was my wish to live that had encouraged me to persist with my exercises.
            Her statement brought back memories. I suddenly recalled what had prompted me to do my exercises time and time again – what had made me persevere with them all. I wanted to be able to talk, sing, drink water, and cook, but most of anything, I wanted to be able to walk with a cane (I talk about it in previous chapters). And I realized that my cousin was right: my wish to walk and drink and sing and cook had stemmed from my wish to live.

​On one of the days devoted to walking, as I was resting after several laps around the wooden handrail made by Eric, my nurse aid and I started discussing the different features of my exercise. We wondered about the cause of my loss of balance at various stages of the lap, and decided it was the narrowness of the structure that had prevented me from keeping a good distance between my legs. We came to the conclusion that when I practiced in the handrail, I should walk up and down with the crutch and then turn while holding on to the bar. My nurse aid must have perceived my self-criticizing attitude during our conversation because she advised that instead of seeing my loss of balance as a mistake, I should look at it as a learning experience.
In the two years I’ve been practicing to walk, I’ve been seeing anything that didn’t fulfill my expectations as a failure. And my expectations have been always above the ordinary. When I first came home, I couldn’t walk without the brace, and Eric always had to help me. That meant I had to practice on Sundays so that Eric wouldn’t have to work. Gradually, I took out the brace and switched to the bar at my insistence (I wanted to walk without help, and that meant being able to lock my knee). I have a vague memory of my early exercises (it was more than a year ago, and my brain hadn’t healed yet), but I remember I was outside on my wheelchair and was crying, and my then nurse aid was telling me not to be so hard on myself.
Many nurse aids came and went in more than a year I’ve spent practicing and practicing, and all of them told me as they were leaving that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. And I’ve switched to the crutch three days a week, part inside the handrail, part outside, and I still see my falls (or almost-falls) as failures. I have to shake my head to take away my thoughts, straighten my back, look ahead, and think, “I can do it.” And when I’m back on my chair, I try to push my memories of a small incident out of my mind. I pretend it never existed and smile. And the walking days are still bad days on my calendar. That’s why I keep trying not to be hard on myself, and to see my falls as learning experiences.
 
 

​Recently, we had a meeting with Elizabeth, a friend whom I mentioned in another chapter. She’s an artist and specializes in Alexander technique, She’s very knowledgeable and has helped me a lot since my rehab started. Elizabeth, Eric, and I met on Zoom because she’d seen a video of my walking, and it had occurred to her that I could benefit by strengthening my pelvic muscles. That’s why she wanted to show us a special pillow to exercise these muscles and she thought Zoom would be a good way for us to see it.
When we met, Eric wanted Elizabeth to see the latest video of my walking, and she instantly agreed. So, I got to watch it as well. It was a real eye-opener. I had the opportunity to see myself walking instead of just experiencing it. I could concentrate on every minute detail.
And as I was watching myself, I discovered something I hadn’t noticed before: what Id done to recover my balance; I’d brought my torso forward, and I’d done it with my gluts.
When I watched myself making this movement, I suddenly conjured an old memory – it was a memory of one of the dance classes I’d attended in my early thirties. I vaguely recalled using my gluts to bring my torso forward. And along with it came my dance teacher’s advice to use my glut muscles to move my torso forward and to jump upward.
This was an old memory that had stayed buried in my mind and that I’d never retrieved. It was part of the store of procedural memories – the muscle memories that are the result of oft-repeated movements, in this case, during a dance class in my youth. As the neurologist friend of my friend had told me, in the process of re-learning to walk, I would disinter buried procedural memories that would aid me in my rehab process. I felt a mixture of happiness and relief; I would finally walk with a cane, step by step.

​When my hemangioma bled, Eric and I ended up in the hospital ICU. Close friends, BHA friends, and Argentine friends, they all knew my operation was about to happen and were in tenterhooks, waiting for the outcome. But then, when the operation was happening, several hemangiomas bled in my brain, and I lay in a coma. And when I woke up, my life changed; everything became part of a long healing process with an unforeseeable end. Luckily, once I was back home, old friends, BHA members and friends, new friends, and Argentine friends visited with me. And as I’ve written in other chapters, new friends grew to be close friends.
I knew a lot of people from Eric’s and my life in Beacon: school parents, parent activists, teachers, clergy members, Nathan’s friends’ parents, summer camp parents, and so on. They didn’t visit with me, but when there was a request for meals, they immediately responded with soup or a full plate; when I ran into them on the street or at a party, they smiled a bright smile and gave me a big hug; and when they ran into Eric or talked to him on the phone, they asked after me.
I knew all these people, but my relationship with them wasn’t so deep as to stir up the wish to visit me. It wasn’t deep enough to vanquish the qualms they must have about dropping by and spending time with me. Yet, when Eric and I went to the high school presentation, we ran into the mother of one of Nathan’s schoolmates. As we greeted each other with a hug, she said to me, “You’ve made my day.” Meetings like this one were so nice. They showed me I was cared for – there was so much love surrounding me.
I’ve wondered what caused Beacon residents’ reaction. If we weren’t close, why did they were glad to see me? Why did they show up with platefuls of food? And a potential answer has come to me. In a small town, you spend a long time doing different things with the same people: you run into the same people at the coffee shop, the store, the local market, the downtown street, the activist group, the march against social injustices, and the school yard. And in doing things together, you build a sense of community that prompts you to give, to hug, and to smile.